Leslie Charteris - The Saint Bids Diamonds

He signed the message with the impish skeleton figure surmounted by a studiously elliptical halo which was the one signature that would leave Hoppy no doubts — the mark of the Saint. And he let Christine read it while he searched his pockets for a coin. Fortunately they had left him his money. He found a duro , and wrapped it up in the paper as he returned to the window. He whistled softly through the bars and saw Julian look up.

The fluttering white scrap fell at the lad's foot. Simon watched him pick it up, unwrap it and peer at the writing. Then Julian looked up again, touched the peak of his shabby cap and was off, swinging down the road on his crutch as quickly as any other man could have travelled on two sound legs…

The Saint's eyes met Christine's again, and each of them could read one message that needed no words to express it. If the note reached Hoppy quickly, and Mr Uniatz acted on it with equal speed, the adventure might have one ending; if nothing like that happened, there might be quite a different one. It was on the lap of the gods.

Simon Templar smiled. He was free; but Christine was there with him, and in the house below there were three men who now held the ticket for which they had all risked their lives many times. Outside, presumably, there were still the dogs; and all over the house, all around them and even around the garden through which they would still have to escape before they could find freedom, were all the accumulated electrical ingenuities with which Reuben Graner guarded his fortress. Even in that room they couldn't consider themselves out of the network of defensive devices with which the house probably bristled from roof to basement. And it might not be long before Graner and Aliston and Palermo became tired of listening for hints and reverted to direct action…

Curiously, the Saint was concerned with none of those things. In all his life, he had never planned anything that was dictated by the possibilities of defeat. He had always prepared for victory.

And in that room he was locked up with something that interested him profoundly.

His gaze turned away from Christine's towards the safe in the corner. Once again he was marooned with that incalculable treasure which had tantalised him so much before, separated from him by nothing more than a few inches of special steel and a combination lock which to most other brigands might have been just as discouraging, but which to the Saint was merely an interesting puzzle that might need twenty minutes to half an hour of uninterrupted concentration to solve. Except that even to touch it would set off another of those electrically operated alarms — the muted siren which he had listened to when Graner was opening it.

In fact, just about everything in the house that mattered seemed to be electrified. Which was all very modern and scientific and efficient, but it also had the corresponding weakness of centralisationallied with the Spanish inefficiency that had doubtless put the house together in the first place. For instance, it was extremely unlikely that a Tenerife builder would have installed a system of independent fuses. He would have been bursting with pride in his own up-to-date technique if he had even put in one…

Simon wandered over to the lamp that hung low above the workbench and contemplated it with a glimmer of impudent challenge. The longer he played with the idea, the more its ramifications appealed to him: With the same reckless half-smile lingering on his lips, he took a perra chica out of his pocket and unscrewed the bulb. A moment later he had slipped the coin into the socket and was screwing the bulb back again on top of it. There was the hissing crack of a spark, and the other light went out.

In the darkness, Christine's hand touched his sleeve and fumbled up his arm.

"Did you do that?" she whispered uncertainly.

He chuckled softly in the gloom.

"Yeah. That was Edison Junior. Blew out their fuse. Let's hope it's the only one they've got. Wait a minute."

He left her again and tiptoed towards the door. A little way from it he fell on one knee and lowered his head until his cheek touched the floor. Not a gleam of light came from the threshold — and the bulb on the stairway must have been switched on when he was brought upstairs, unless the carrying party had stumbled up in the dark. Even then, some faint glow should have filtered up from the landing below… But he saw nothing.

He rose, went on to the door and rested one ear lightly against the panels. Somewhere away below he could hear a confused murmur of voices and movement which sounded to him like heavenly music. Even though he had to strain to hear it, it was enough to tell him what he wanted to know.

The lights downstairs had also gone out. It was safe to assume that every other light in the house was also out of action. And if that had happened, the whole of Graner's elaborate system of electrical alarms had ceased to function at the same time.

There was one way to turn the theory into certain knowledge, and it was an experiment which would have to be made anyway.

Simon moved stealthily towards the safe.

His eyes had the cat's trick of adjusting themselves instantly to darkness, and he had the same feline gift of noiseless movement without effort. He crossed the room until he could feel the safe looming in front of him. He put out his hand and touched it delicately with the tips of his fingers, holding his breath while he did so. The silence was still unbroken. His finger tips slithered down over the smooth surface until they found the handle and shaped themselves around it, With a sudden summoning of his resolution, he tightened his fingers and grasped it firmly.

The siren remained mute.

"Where are you?"

Christine's question reached him in a frightened breath as he crouched down in front of the safe door. Simon answered quietly but in his natural voice: "Here."

He put out his hand and touched her as she searched for him and guided her down to his side. His right hand was already turning the knob of the combination, "What are you doing?"

Her voice was still unsteady.

"Opening the safe," he said practically.

"Can you wait for that?"

"Lady," said the Saint firmly, "when I last looked inside this tin can it was bulging with a collection of jools that made me feel giddy to look at. I don't say they're worth quite as much as your lottery ticket, but they wouldn't come far behind it. I can always wait for a box of boodle like that."

"But Graner will be coming—"

"Not yet — I hope. After all, they left me tied up, and they didn't know I had a knife. The first thing they ought to think of is that the fuse blew out by itself. They'll try to repair it, which ought to keep them out of mischief for a bit. It won't do them any good, because as soon as they put a new fuse in it'll blow out again. Then they may start to smell a rat and wonder how we're getting on. But not until… Now be a good girl and keep quiet for a minute while I give my celebrated imitation of a burglar."

His ear was pressed against the chill steel, listening for the click of the tumblers; his sensitive fingers twirled the dial backwards and forwards, fraction by fraction, probing the secrets of the lock like a physiologist finding his way through an exquisitely fine dissection. To Christine, the quiet and unflurried patience without which his manipulations would have had no posssibility of success must have been maddening. He was aware that she was shivering with the effort of crushing down the natural wild instincts of panic. His own nerves were drawn nearly to snapping point, and the haunting fear that the fuse diversion might not keep Graner and company occupied as long as he had hoped was never out of his mind; but he held himself with an iron self-control.